Nerdio Manager for Enterprise v3.1 released into public preview

Yesterday we released our latest monthly release into Public Preview!! At Nerdio we are extremely proud of our innovation and our product is built on customer feedback. I will give you a quick overview of each feature:

1. Azure AD joined VMs (preview)?– Azure AD Join is now in public preview and in this release we enable you to join your AVD Host pools to Azure AD! There are a few limitations at this stage though as its just preview. These are that you cannot use FSLogix profiles and MFA is not supported. When Azure AD Join goes GA this will be supported
2. Windows 11 Support - We now fully support the Windows 11 preview. You can now deploy Windows 11 host pools directly from Nerdio. Note currently Windows 11 is in public preview so this is not recommended for production usage.
3. Host Pool Disaster Recovery - We can now distribute our host pools in an active/active DR configuration and session hosts will automatically be split across the 2 regions. The FSLogix profiles will automatically be replicated via Cloud Cache. So for example, you could be split between UK South and UK West, so if UK West went down, your users would be redirected to UK South, and Nerdio Autoscaling would automatically take care of the host capacity for you.
4. Reserved Instance Analytics and Recommendations - Nerdio will automatically analyse your usage of your autoscaling and then make recommendations on what reserved instances to use to reduce your Azure costs by an additional 60%
5. Multiple Auto-Scale Schedules. We can now set multiple pre-staging schedules to accommodate different requirements. Say for example you had some workers who only needed their desktops starting up on Sunday morning at 11am, we can now configure Monday - Friday, and then a separate schedule for weekends.
6. User-Driven Personal Host Pool Auto-Scaling mode. We can now configure our personal desktop pools to automatically power on when connecting, and then when the users log off the desktop will automatically go into a de-allocated state after a period of time which you define. This means that you only pay for the resources which you actually use.
7. Directory Profile and FSLogix configuration when creating host pools - When creating a host pool we can now select between AD or Azure Active Directory, and custom FSLogix profiles. This also gives us the ability to disable FSLogix profiles before creating the host pool
8. 32GB OS Disk Support - We now fully support 32GB OS Disks. We also have a scripted action which will shrink the OS Disk saving you money on storage costs across your host pools.
9. Force User log off on hung/stopped hosts - We can now force a user to log off who has a hung session.
10. Add Suffix to personal desktop creation - You can now add your own suffix for the computer names when creating personal desktops
11. Un-assign users from personal desktops - We now have a scripted action which will un-assign a user from a personal desktop pool so the desktop can be easily be re-assigned to somebody else
12. Automatic Nerdio Manager Updates - We can now automate the Nerdio Manager updates, meaning you can set a schedule to update it automatically.
13. Configure Regional Windows settings - We now have a scripted action which will customise the regional settings of deployed VM
14. New REST APIs - We now have additional rest API's to return host status, delete session hosts and list networks and network resource groups.

I think you will agree that is a pretty cool list and there is even more. To view a full list visit here - https://nmw.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045731614-Release-Notes

If you want to know more about how Nerdio can help your Azure Virtual Desktop deployments then please get in touch with me and I would be happy to have a chat!